Adam Wheeler fakes his way into Harvard

Whether you have or have not heard about the Adam Wheeler "Harvard hoax" in recent news, the college admissions and guidance field is scrambling for justice and further investigation of the case of Adam Wheeler, a 23 year old Delaware native who fabricated dozens of pieces of crucial information over several years, ultimately getting into Harvard on false pretenses.

The story initially seems like an elaborate scheme of deception, but it becomes remarkably clear after examining the steps Mr. Wheeler took to get himself into this predicament. Step by step, his entire life became fabricated on paper until he was building lie after lie into a truly unbelievable set of personal accomplishments.

Wheeler began his college career at Bowdoin, the school he attended for a two years after coming from a public high school in Delaware, where he graduated in the top 10% of his class. This strong but still reasonable academic career is starkly contrasts the alleged 4.0 at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA (questionably the top prep school in the country) in addition to a perfect 2400 SAT. With these outstanding statistics as well as one year of straight A's from MIT (also falsified), Wheeler was admitted to Harvard's incoming transfer class just after being dismissed from Bowdoin for "academic dishonesty."

While at Harvard, Wheeler maintained mostly A's and B's and was a generally strong student. His aspirations, however, were above his performance letter. While applying for a Rhodes scholarship in what would have been his Junior year at Harvard, one of his professors noticed that his application had plagiarized the work of another Harvard professor. Wheeler abruptly  left Harvard while under investigation for his falsified transfer application; he was apparently expecting another dismissal. Following dismissal from Harvard, Wheeler began a new set of transfer applications, this time to Brown and Yale.

Ironically, none of this came to surface with authorities until Yale began to look into his application, and contacted his parents at home. They revealed that Wheeler had been dismissed from Harvard for academic dishonesty and essentially brought the scheme to an end. Yale ended up contacting both his true high school in Delaware, which revealed Wheeler's true identity, and Phillips Academy, which confirmed that Wheeler did not attend that school.

The implications of this story are huge and have made several articles in the New York Times, the first of which recounts much of the tale told above and ends with updates on Wheeler's trial hearing. The second article is more interesting for members of the college admissions community. It displays Wheeler's falsified resume as publicly released by Harvard and also covers the implications of this story for the world of college admissions. If Wheeler was only turned in by his parents and never truly caught by authorities until then, how many other students are attending top colleges under false pretenses? There is no limit to how many students could be enacting similar concerts of fraud without ever being detected. If not simply for exciting the community over a deep concern, this should serve as a wake up call for higher education in the United States, hopefully adding in some checks to the system to be sure this can never happen again, though it undoubtedly will.

Wheeler is on the hook for $45,000 in financial aid and awards he received from Harvard and plead not guilty to offenses involving larceny, identity fraud, falsifying an endorsement and pretending to hold a degree. The ensuing trial is sure to incite a lot of attention.